I’ve been wanting to read Winter’s Bone by Daniel Woodrell for a long time now. Set in an Ozark winter, it seemed like a good thing to read during the arctic vortex. So I curled up in front of the fireplace and settled in for a few days of reading… and finished it in one sitting. OK, so I did take a dinner break and even grabbed a shower between chapters but it still went much faster than I expected.
If you expect a short novel to also be light or superficial, Winter’s Bone will disappoint you. Don’t think of it as a “quick read” think of it as a “family saga concentrate.” Woodrell packs all the love and resentments of an ancient family neatly into two or three sentences at a time.
“Sonny made fists and said, ‘What was the fight about?’ ‘Me bein’ me I guess.’ ‘How many was it?”‘ ‘A few.’ ‘Tell us the names. For when we grow up.”
You get a deeper sense of the family from those sentences than some authors convey in a whole chapter.
Winter’s Bone is about Ree Dolly, a high school dropout that has to find her father, dead or alive, before the bail bondsman takes her house. Mom is no help. The stress of being the wife of a crank-cooker left her… well, to quote Woodrell,
“her mind broke and the parts scattered and she let them go.”
So Ree is caring for her younger bothers and mentally ill mom while trying to find her dad. Before long, it becomes pretty clear that her dad was made to disappear by some of his associates for actions unbecoming to a Dolly. Considering the family business, actions unbecoming to a Dolly must be pretty unbecoming. When Ree asks the wrong people the wrong questions, there is some serious hell to pay.
When you first meet her, you may not like Ree very much. She blows her nose onto the ground without benefit of a tissue, she makes her little brothers put on socks that are so gamey that even the little boys complain about the smell, she scolds them for not having enough pride to walk home through the cold when they are offered a ride home, and refuses to ask for desperately needed help.
“Never. Never ask for what ought to be offered.”
Then, even before the first chapter is finished, you realize that you don’t understand this world and Ree does. She’s a pragmatic kid that knows the unspoken rules and also knows what she has to do. It doesn’t take long before you trust her judgement as to when to fight, when to take a beating, when to just let it go, and when not to. She earns the readers respect.
“She would never cry where her tears might be seen and counted against her.”
As we follow Ree’s search, we are introduced to an honor code as strong as that of the Cosa Nostra and just as deeply grounded in secrecy and family. Her tenacity and her dignity earn her respect and ultimately help saving her home. Ree has only to claim her father but that requires trusting her enemies and proves more horrific than anything she has been through yet.
A drive through the Ozarks will never feel tranquil again.
Read ~ Write ~ Wander
~Angie